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Yoshinori Ishii opens the competition with five finely rendered courses, and one literal piece of artwork.

The 2013 Culinary Masters Competition got off to a glittering start at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills. On a terrace overlooking Rodeo Drive, chef Yoshinori Ishii of Umu in London served a five-course menu that reflected both Japanese tradition and Ishii's modern sensibility.

Judging booklets were distributed to each guest. Every course was scored on a 100-point scale on the basis of presentation, flavor, execution, and originality.

The evening began with a reception featuring three inventive takes on sushi. From top, salmon temari with plum sauce and white asparagus, "London style" with crab zucchini, and seared toro with Japanese herbs.

Second Course: Usuzukuri of Fluke with ChirizuThe fluke was presented on a plate of glass set over a wood-block print bearing a message from Ishii: Billions of people, hundreds of countries, happy together, with delicious foods

Fifth Course: Field of Beverly Hills"Charamisu," a witty spin on tiramisu made with green tea and ginjo sake

Master Chef Masaharu Morimoto, right, and Yoshinori Ishii, left, put the finishing touches on sushi before the first guests arrive.

The dessert course, called Field of Beverly Hills, was plated to resemble a flowerpot and served with a miniature watering can holding a light sake sauce.

Dom Pérignon, the official Champagne of the Culinary Masters Competition, poured its Vintage 2004 with the sushi served at the reception.

Years ago, when Ishii was the chef at the Japanese embassies in Geneva and New York, he was inspired to write a poem about the sense of peace and connection that food can create. In the months before his competition dinner, he carved those words into a wood block and then pressed 70 prints of the poem onto thick pieces of parchment, which he used to decorate his transcendent second course: Usuzukuri of Fluke with Chirizu, a deceptively simple plate of sashimi served with a savory dipping sauce made from yuzu, daikon, chives, seaweed, Japanese chilies, and soy sauce. The fluke had been delivered live that morning to the hotel’s kitchen, where Ishii cut the notoriously unyielding flesh into strips as translucent as frosted glass and as soft as silk. Even Morimoto was awed by the young sushi master. “I don’t know why he chose to do this,” Morimoto said of the fluke course. “It takes a sharp knife and sharp skill. For 60 people, it is unheard of!”

Ishii’s entire menu demonstrated similar skill and subtlety. His Kaiyose-nuta, a beautiful arrangement of seafood, showcased such techniques as poaching abalone in sake for seven hours to achieve the perfect texture and serving botan ebi raw to emphasize the shrimp’s natural sweetness. “Lots of people will look at this dish just as shellfish,” Ishii said, “but every element in it is different. Everything is cooked the best way I thought it could be.” For another course, he seared two magnificently marbled loins of Japanese A5 wagyu beef—the highest and tenderest grade—and layered them with deep umami flavors: mushroom rice, mushroom purée, and veal demi-glace accented with soy sauce.

At his restaurant in London, an unusually serene setting, Ishii creates intricate meals in the Japanese kaiseki tradition, which requires that every element be under his control. He sources all of his ingredients—including catching some of the fish—and serves his culinary creations on hand-thrown pottery that he makes. Re-creating the Umu experience some 5,000 miles away on a chic private terrace overlooking Rodeo Drive was no easy feat, but Ishii did just that. “A knife is all I brought,” he said, pointing to his Japanese Aritsugu and Nenohi blades, “and this poem.”

Long before Masaharu Morimoto became Iron Chef Morimoto–and vanquished competitors such as Bobby Flay on television's Iron Chef and Iron Chef America–he spent years studying sushi and kaiseki in his native Hiroshima. Those formal culinary genres were too limiting for the wildly inventive Morimoto, however, and in 1985 he moved to New York City to develop his own style of food, a thrilling blend of East and West. In 1993 he became the executive chef at the private Sony Club, a move that had the city's dining cognoscenti scrambling for an invitation. Soon after, Nobu Matsuhisa recruited him for Nobu New York, and he became the restaurant's first executive chef. He went on to open his first Morimoto restaurant in Philadelphia in 2001, and since then, he has expanded his enterprise to include nine restaurants in New York, the Napa Valley, Mexico City, and Mumbai, among other locations. He has also developed specialty lines of beer and cutlery.

With the exception of sushi, Morimoto says that his fare is not Japanese, and indeed, he is famous for such dishes as a savory "pizza" topped with raw tuna, jalapeño, red onion, olives, and anchovy aioli. This type of nimble, cross-cultural creation had a powerful influence on another classically trained Japanese chef: Yoshinori Ishii, Morimoto's nominee for the Robb Report Culinary Masters Competition. Ishii attended the Osaka Abeno Tsuji Cooking School and then worked for nine years at Kitchen, an exquisite Michelin three-star restaurant in Kyoto. There he learned the subtleties of kaiseki, the intensely seasonal multicourse menu that dates back centuries and was the inspiration for modern tasting menus.

But Ishii, too, felt the urge to explore new culinary frontiers. In 1999, he packed his knives and fishing rods (he is also a skilled fisherman, who chronicles his adventures on a blog at www.kaiseki-master.blogspot.com) and obtained a position as the head chef at the Japanese embassy in Geneva and then at the embassy in New York City. In 2006, Morimoto hired him as the omakase chef at Morimoto New York. For four years, Ishii unleashed his own creativity in his nightly tasting menus there before moving to London to run his own restaurant, Umu, an elegant spot in the Mayfair neighborhood. Ishii, now 42, crafts a very personal version of his native cuisine using local and Japanese ingredients. He takes a kaiseki approach, creating not just the menu but also the entire experience: Dishes are served on ceramics he makes, plates are decorated with his calligraphy and wood-block artwork, and tables are adorned with his flower arrangements. Sometimes, he even catches the fish. He earned his first Michelin star in 2010 and has retained it ever since. "I don't know how to separate work from my hobbies," he says with a laugh. –Sonoko Sakai

YOSHINORI ISHII:I haven't thanked you enough for all that you've done for me.

MASAHARU MORIMOTO:Oh, no, not to worry. It's a pleasure. For a long time, I've been exploring a cuisine that combines different cultures and trying to dispatch it into the world. How long have I known you, Ishii?

YI:About eight years. I was working as head chef for the Japanese embassy in New York and heard you speak at a culinary seminar. When my contract with the embassy was up, I wanted to stay here, and that's when a friend introduced me to you. You helped me get a working visa.

MM:Since 9/11, it's been difficult for Japanese restaurants to get skilled chefs to come from Japan. When I saw your résumé, I wanted to hire you right away. Based on your track record, it was easy to obtain an O visa.

YI:An O visa is an artist visa. I am not an artist; I am a chef, and it would have been impossible to get the visa on my own. In order to qualify my credentials as an artist, I needed someone powerful like you–and you asked your celebrity-chef friends to write letters of recommendation as well.

When I moved to the United States, I only knew about the narrow and strict culinary world of Kyoto. When I saw your dynamic presentation and cuisine, it was something that didn't exist in my world. And when I saw that people were really happy eating your food, I began to feel that this is perhaps the true meaning of kaiseki–to make people happy. I realized I needed to break the traditional ideas and techniques I was rigidly bound by. Your cuisine had the impact to make that happen.

MM:When I put you in charge of the omakase section at Morimoto in New York, I don't remember asking you to do things this way or that way, but I understood where you were coming from. And your style of cooking actually turned out to be very flexible.

I like to play on the meaning of some Japanese words like omotenashi, which means "to entertain." I also define it as having no facade. Do what you want. There are all kinds of culinary disciplines, and you can do what you want when you come here, but you need to understand that people have different tastes and customs. As a Japanese person, it is basic to introduce Japanese culture to others, but how to do it is the question. You can't just serve raw fish with soy sauce and expect everyone here to appreciate it. Even in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco–there are still people who can't handle raw fish. Our role is to open the doors a little wider for people.

That's especially true for you. London is a little behind those other cities, and I know you're having a hard time getting certain ingredients, like bonito flakes. Weren't you using ham to make dashi [broth] before?

YI:Yes, I was using Ibérico ham and tomato.

MM:You got the umami from ham and tomato–that's great! You wouldn't have come up with such an ingenious idea if you were working in Kyoto. This is different, but it works.

YI:When I first arrived in London, I found out that the European blue lobster tasted delicious, but I couldn't find a Japanese recipe that would complement it. So I tried to recall a good lobster dish that I had eaten in the past, and the only one I really loved was the Lobster épicé that you had on your menu. The spicy shell is roasted to a crisp; the inner meat is on the rare side. So I took your recipe and rearranged it my way. My dish is called wild Scottish lobster, tofu bisque, homemade shichimi pepper. It's like a lobster miso soup. I make a puree of tofu and a rich broth using the lobster head. I also roast the lobster until it's nice and crispy and serve it on the side of the tofu bisque. It's one of the most popular dishes at Umu, and if I didn't have a chance to work with you, I would have never been able to create it.

MM:A lot of people call what we do "fusion." I hate the word: Fusion equals confusion. It has a tendency to attract people with mediocre skills. They think, "I could do that. Just change it. Change anything." But it's only when you have a foundation to stand on that you can move between cultures and change cuisines. You have that foundation.